Collaboration comprises two or more people, e.g., within a group, working toward a common goal. Groups are useful for collaboration, since viewpoints from different people (e.g., people with diverse backgrounds) can be useful to achieve the goal in an efficient manner, with potential problems and solutions being achieved based upon different people joining together to add to the collaboration. A typical collaboration can include a group of individuals, referred to as participants, that work together toward a common goal, live or synchronous communications resources used to communicate and share content, and work product associated with the collaboration (e.g., conversations, documents shared or modified, etc.).
Collaboration software can be utilized to establish a platform in which people, utilizing their computing devices, can communicate with each other, share content and work toward a common goal using various software tools, such as phone calls (e.g., voice over internet or VoIP communications), email, instant messaging, online video conferences, social media, content management systems, some or all of which may include sharing of documents and other content, etc. Some challenges associated with a collaborative platform are defining and managing groups that are collaborating as well as the common goal associated with a collaborative group. Historically, there have been certain approaches to this, such as manual group administration (e.g., one or more group participants set up a community or workspace or group within a collaborative platform and identify members, send invites to the community or group, uploads and curates content, etc.), and automatic generation of groups utilizing intelligent semantic analysis of communications and content within a collaborative platform (e.g., operations performed at one or more servers hosting a collaborative platform that attempt to identify users within the platform that may be linked to the same collaborative effort based upon communications between users and common content within such communications). These approaches can be either labor intensive (if handled manually, e.g., by an individual of a group or a system administrator) or potentially yield inaccuracies or unexpected results in groups of people and/or collaborative goals when automated (e.g., based upon how semantic analysis is performed, whether algorithms analyzing communications between people and related content are reliable or accurate in providing an effective result). Because both manual and automated systems are far from ideal, personal productivity tools are still the norm for a vast majority of ad-hoc or casual collaboration, where even if content is shared, the tools are not aware of each other or the goal. Email threads, for example, appear to be shared and do represent a conversational thread; however, it's actually copies that are shared and the thread is implied. Content shared in email that would be useful context for collaboration on the phone or in meetings remains locked in an email-only silo. And every time new tools or devices are used in a collaboration over time, the “thread” is broken. Meetings are scheduled and then occur, but are not associated with the larger goal.